Apr

Very Dark Night of the Soul: Bathroom Edition

As the semester winds down, things get…dark. Especially in the bathrooms of the LLC. Proceed with caution.

It was around one in the morning when a student ran through my suite’s open door and into the communal bathroom. Let’s call him Freddie. A suitemate and I were sitting in the lounge doing homework and didn’t think much of it—shit gets weird late at night, right? I didn’t get a great look at Freddie when he ran past me, but I was about 80% sure I knew who he was and figured nothing too fucked up would happen.

Then I heard a moan.

I looked at my suitemate to see if he’d heard it, too—but then it happened again. Definitely a moan. Maybe a moan/grunt. We couldn’t tell if it was a jerking off kind of moan, or just a poop kind of moan. I thought it could go either way. Another suitemate was in the shower and I was starting to get a little worried about her—the shower was obviously on and anyone who’d moan that loudly while in one of the stalls with someone clearly in the room might get up to weirder shit.

Thinking I’d grab my toothbrush and toothpaste to have a reason to go into the bathroom, I stood up to investigate. As soon as I got near the door, I heard a loud banging. Again, I couldn’t tell if Freddie was banging his elbow on the wall (the stalls are really, really tiny) or just getting toilet paper really aggressively.

I slowly opened the bathroom door. Freddie was still in the stall (and the door was closed, thank god), still banging on things. And then he started singing. Or chanting. I couldn’t really tell. The toilet flushed and I ran out of the room.

Another one of my suitemates came into the lounge, clearly about to brush her teeth before bed. I told her to avoid the bathroom and went down the hall to find my RA. I knocked, no answer. On my way back I heard the voice of another guy on my floor, one who is friends with Freddie. Let’s call him John.

“Yo, John,” I called. “Is Freddie studying with you tonight?”

He looked confused. “No, why?”

“And he doesn’t live in [our dorm], right?”

“Definitely not.”

“Can you come over? I think he’s in our bathroom.”

We walked back into my suite and Freddie was still singing and chanting. John went into the bathroom just as Freddie must’ve finished up. He was washing his hands in the sink, pants undone. Post poop euphoria or something else?

“Hey Freddie, how’s it going?” John asked. I had returned to the lounge to wait with my suitemates but everything was clearly audible. They started talking about school things and their summer plans as they stood in the bathroom. Finally they started to walk out. My suitemates and I leapt for our books and pretended to be doing our reading.

“So, Freddie, what brings you to [dorm]?” John asked.

“Oh, I was studying on [the floor below ours],” Freddie said, finally zipping up his pants.

“Was there something wrong with the bathrooms?”

Bathrooms being fucked up isn’t that implausible, and while it isn’t common to bolt upstairs to another suite (or sing and bang on things as you do so), I could almost empathize with the need to do so.

“No,” Freddie said. “But I looked around and the bathroom seemed really open—too open. And I had to do something really nasty—”

Fuck, I thought. He was totally jerking off in there.

“And I didn’t want to stink up the place.”

Oh thank god. He just had to shit.

John stopped walking—they were standing outside of the suite, next to the elevator. “You came upstairs just to take a massive dump? You know that people who live here can hear you right now, right?”